superstition ain't the way
Today I woke up at half past nine. That’s an OK time because, although it’s a bit earlier than usual for me, it’s a nice round number – a multiple of five. Ideally I would’ve liked to wake up at 9:25 or :35, but :30 isn’t disastrous. So I got up and walked her to the station and got coffee and alone on the way back I thought my God, why am I so superstitious?
I’ve always been this way. As long as I can remember, I’ve made my neighbour swap places with me if I’m assigned an even numbered seat on a plane. I’m not particularly religious but I carry Saints Jude and Valentine with me on every holiday and high-stakes occasion for good fortune and health, just in case. It’s bad luck to prematurely claim a win, or a loss, or to take the first bite of someone else’s food. 5 is good luck, then 7, then 3, 1, and the evens are situation-dependent. Now, the TikTok manifestation stuff drips down to Instagram reels, and those are inescapable when you’re working from home and easily distracted. It’s always the same thing dressed up differently, manifesting, the law of attraction, ‘comment X to claim.’ Much of my generation and the one above have fallen into a state of atheistic religion. The earliest example I can remember is The Secret-type spiritual self-help books of the 2000s, then YouTube subliminals, then the TikTok stuff. It’s all very ritualistic, and obviously there is a method to it – not only the warmth of self-assurance but that idea of setting your mind on a goal and, whether consciously or subconsciously, slowly working to achieve it.
What bothers me isn’t the magical thinking itself. Under the surface, these superstitions are, like so, so many other things we do, an attempt to feel in control. TikTok especially is full of young, impressionable people, who mustn’t live blind to the fact that fate makes no sense. Living by a set of completely arbitrary rules, without the community element of dogma-based institutions like religion or academia, breeds paranoia and compulsions and the feeling that if everything could suddenly and randomly go right for you, so could it all go wrong. To me it’s a sort of digital OCD, trapping the more suggestible of us in cycles of anxiety and attempting to veil the truth that control over one’s life is utterly impossible. I think that’s why the fact of affirmations and manifestation and REPOST OR HAVE A BAD MAY!!! going mainstream has been feeling more insidious to me lately – the answer is probably boredom. I’m inside a lot right now, studying for exams, seeing fewer people, not really living it up. Isolation gives space for this kind of thinking. Lower self-esteem, less stimulation, more time to construct illogical private systems. It’s the same playbook I used as an anorexic teenager. Too much time and not enough world.
From Pascal’s Pensées: ‘The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion. And yet it is the greatest of our miseries. For it is that above all which prevents us thinking about ourselves and leads us imperceptibly to destruction. But for that we should be bored, and boredom would drive us to seek some more solid means of escape, but diversion passes our time and brings us imperceptibly to our death.’